I: Story Time

Before I became an Anglican, I was doing my seminary-required units of mentored ministry at a congregational church. It was the church of my childhood; we were not a part of any official denomination (nor are they still), and there was no standard confession of faith apart from a fairly typical statement on the website that pointed to the infallibility of Scripture and the content of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus when it came to many points of doctrine, there was a great deal of wiggle room and it really came down to how much the senior pastor promulgated or enforced his views in and through the board of elders and the various volunteers who taught Sunday School and led Bible studies.

And so it came to pass, towards the end of my tenure there, as I was growing towards Anglicanism, I was invited to assist the senior pastor with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. It was done monthly there, which is a lot more frequent than your typical non-denom evangelical church, but there was still no consistent form of prayer. It was not seen as a sacrament there, anyway, so the liturgy didn’t really matter as such, so long as the words of institution were quoted along the way. So I, for my portion of the prayers, decided to pick up the Prayer Book and try out a section of it. (Full disclosure, it was the Episcopalian book of 1979, which is all I knew at the time, and probably the best fit anyway since some of its eucharistic prayers are fairly generic and inoffensive across denominational lines.) But I ran into a problem with the pastor when he was proofreading what I’d prepared: “And we offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to you, O Lord of all…” The word “sacrifice” was a problem, and it was axed.

II: The Sacrifice(s) of the Mass

The fear, of course, was that we’d be falling into the errors of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the “Sacrifice of the Mass” and all those other scary terms that evangelical protestants are supposed to be wary of. What this pastor didn’t realize (and what I was yet too untrained to understand either, let alone explain) is that the term sacrifice has quite a broad meaning, whereas the Roman error is quite specific.

The issue which the Reformers raised regarding Roman teaching centered around the notion that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice that in its very celebration is efficacious toward the remission of sins and relief for the souls in purgatory. The Reformers rightly axed the efficacy of the Sacrament for those in purgatory because they knew Purgatory itself was a false medieval development, and they rightly recentered the efficacy of the Sacrament for the living upon the Cross of Christ, wherein our one, true, propitiation is found.

As a result, the Lutheran Book of Concord asserts

There are chiefly two kinds of sacrifices, and no more, in which all others are comprehended. The one is a propitiatory sacrifice, by which expiation is made for guilt and punishment, God is reconciled, his wrath appeased, and remission of sins obtained for others. The other is a sacrifice of thanksgiving, not to obtain forgiveness of sin or reconciliation, but made by those who are already reconciled, in order to give thanks for the remission of sins, and for other favors and gifts they received.

Augsburg Confession XXIV(XII):19

This exact same distinction was taken up in the English Prayer Books, which describe Holy Communion as “this our Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving“. It is a phrase which pointedly rejects the Roman notion of Eucharistic sacrifice being propitiatory ex opere operato (from the work itself), and instead highlights that the sacrifice we make is one of praise and thanksgiving before God (hence the name eucharist, meaning thanksgiving).

Another sacrifice that is made at Holy Communion is an oblation or self-offering:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively [living] sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that all we who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction.

Book of Common Prayer

This prayer, also found in every Anglican Prayer Book shortly after the “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” line, further enriches and expands and corrects our understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Not only do we remember Christ’s own propitiatory sacrifice of himself upon the Cross, not only do we offer our own sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, but we also offer up our selves entirely unto God (directly quoting and applying Romans 12:1).

III: Summary Thoughts

In retrospect, I am still a little disappointed that my congregational pastor was not familiar with the biblical language of sacrifice, in its broadness, to recognize that there is ample room for right (and fruitful, and even necessary) use of the term in Holy Communion, though I recognize that as one of the general blind spots of the modern evangelical tradition. I’m also aware that within Anglican circles we like to argue about liturgy to an incredible degree – in what order our prayers should be said, which translation to use, what the implied doctrinal logic is behind a given liturgical rite and form. But in any case, the language of a “sacrifice of thanksgiving” and the sacrifice of “ourselves, our souls and bodies” are common threads throughout our tradition, whether we say them before or after the ministration of Communion, whether we directly quote the Scriptures or paraphrase them in a modern-language rite.

With such richness of tradition and thoroughness of teaching at our disposal, we are amply equipped to form Christian worshipers with a robust biblical, creedal, and patristic faith precisely as the Reformers sought to restore. While I don’t doubt there is an end in sight to the hand-wringing we are prone to make over details, I firmly believe that we can be absolutely confident in the orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition’s handling of Holy Communion. For, when it comes to worship, we mean what we say, and we say what we mean.